In a letter to victims who filed a lawsuit against the company, 23andMe blames its breach on customers for reusing passwords.

Hope this isn’t a repeated submission. Funny how they’re trying to deflect blame after they tried to change the EULA post breach.

  • mp04610@lemm.eeEnglish
    3012·
    10 months ago

    From these 14,000 initial victims, however, the hackers were able to then access the personal data of the other 6.9 million million victims because they had opted-in to 23andMe’s DNA Relatives feature.

    How exactly are these 6.9M users at fault? They opted in to a feature of the platform that had nothing to do with their passwords.

    On top of that, the company should have enforced strong passwords and forced 2FA for all accounts. What they’re doing is victim blaming.

    • Falcon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      83·
      10 months ago

      users knowingly opted into a feature that had a clear privacy risk.

      Strong passwords often aren’t at issue, password re-use is. If un-{salted, hashed} passwords were compromised in a previous breach, then it doesn’t matter how strong those passwords are.

      Every user who was compromised:

      1. Put their DNA profile online
      2. Opted to share their information in some way

      A further subset of users failed to use a unique and strong password.

      A 2FA token (think Matrix) might have helped here, other than that, individuals need to take a greater responsibility for personal privacy. This isn’t an essential service like water, banking, electricity etc. This is a place to upload your DNA profile…

      • sudneo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        33·
        10 months ago

        As I said elsewhere, the company implemented this feature and apparently did not do absolutely jack about the increased risk of account compromise deriving from it. If I would sit in a meeting discussing this feature I would immediately say that accounts which share data with others are way too sensitive and at least these should have 2fa enforced. If you don’t want it, you don’t share data. Probably the company does not have a good security culture and this was not done.

      • Hegar@kbin.social
        14·
        10 months ago

        users knowingly opted into a feature that had a clear privacy risk.

        Your aunt who still insists she’s part Cherokee is not as capable of understanding data security risks as the IT department of the multi-million dollar that offered the ludicrously stupid feature in the first place.

        People use these sites once right? Who’s changing their password on a site they don’t log into anymore? Given that credential stuffing was inevitable and foreseeable, the feature is obviously a massive risk that shouldn’t have been launched.